Update data automatically

[contrapunctus-1]

It would be great if downloaded data could be updated automatically. simonpoole pointed out -

[...] updating is "fairly" expensive [...] (updating essentially deletes everything except changed elements and then redownloads and merges)

I take it there is no API through which editing applications can instruct osm.org to watch certain areas for changes, and inform the editing application of changes in those areas? That would allow for updating only when necessary.

Failing that, Vespucci could be configued to auto-update data in one or more situations (app started with some data already downloaded, app switched to, before upload, etc), and/or at periodic intervals.

[simonpoole]

I take it there is no API through which editing applications can instruct osm.org to watch certain areas for changes, and inform the editing application of changes in those areas? That would allow for updating only when necessary.

You can query for changesets in a bounding box (~~though not by age iirc~~ time parameters are possible), but because of the issue with large changeset bounding boxes you run in to the same issue as the "history" function on openstreetmap.org, that is you can't really use the results because there are too many false positives.

Wrt automatically updating, this is very expensive as it essentially deletes all downloaded data and re-downloads the current data. This will definitely need some thinking about before implementation.

[simonpoole]

IMHO it might be better to simply store a download date with the bounding box information and warn if it is very old. Particularly automatically updating on app start/resume would create serious complications.